History is and was and so is that patch
of pavement where one tiny leaf shape
is never wet no matter how much rain.
It’s in the shards of clay pipes on the banks
of the Thames and the salt-glaze fragments.
It’s in the loose change in my pocket
and the fact that there is never any
loose change in my pocket. It’s in the bits
and bobs, the fairy on the rock cake,
at the foot of our stairs. It’s t’ick
as a coddle and mild as milk.

There’s a king and queen and offspring
and they’re effing and blinding or not –
‘cause that’s common! It’s in the darkness,
the rose moon, a clear deep navy sky
and a box of Price’s candles to light
the longest street market in London
where we ply, plight and sing a bit.
It’s in the pain of home and the urge
to command that pain with real true facts.
It is what it is, although that’s contentious.
It’s a bumble bee, a Brussels sprout,
and sometimes, even, a brown-tail moth.

How many bodies have lain in this room –
letting the sleep breath rise, coming to
with the sun, letting out groans as they shift
their legs. One, then the other. Have risen,

letting their wake breath rise, steady,
and lit a flame – lifted or switched on a kettle.
Their hands, one then the other, steady.
Found bread in a container for bread

while the lit flame burns under the kettle,
found some butter in a container for butter.
Their hands: one then the other, steady,
spreading what tastes they can bear.

with Dawn, as she is the only one who can no longer
tell a different story. Dawn dies,
and because we love her exactly the way we should,
her funeral is just so. There are
so many flowers, they will pull her out of the block
to the waiting hearse and the effort
needed to do this will make it seem as if she has been
here all her life – and even if they know,
no-one will choose this moment to mention that she was,
in fact, born in Battersea and came
here in the sixties, when it was all over, and we
were mostly just getting older
and not really swinging much at all.

Fog, drifting in from the river, bends sound
and on days like that we hear the chimes
of Big Ben or Waterloo Station announcements
in our beds, or a voice, shouting, That’s a lie!
across the backyards and thirty odd years.

The voice is mine and the day isn’t foggy;
bright sun and our kitchen window wide open.
Miss C. is leaning over a wall that isn’t there now,
telling Olive something scandalous about us;
the sound drifts up under its own steam.

As I lean out and shout, Olive ducks, runs,
wanting none of it, she’s no gossip. Miss C.
hates our youth, our ease, our lack of carpet,
which is fair enough. I tell her, I know our floors
are thin, I hear you screaming at your mother!

That’s not fair! she says, and yes, it wasn’t.
I was clumsy and cack-tongued that day,
I hadn’t meant she shouldn’t shout at her
demented mother, I simply meant in flats
the horizon is thinner and that’s just how it is.

There’s something in the air that makes all sound
bend like its coming from us and one night she storms up
to find the person drilling at midnight is not us,
but in the block next door. She was kind when the cat
was ill, and soon after stopped complaining.

She told me they’d had a pub: something to do
with Charlie Chaplin. After her mother died,
the fog came for her, but there was no one
to care or yell at her; just somewhere to shove
her forehead until all her disappointments took hold.

What did they (our builders) intend for us
when they left us unnamed, a small square
of streets (named for streets that went before them)
surrounded by ever larger streets and buildings –

so one day we wake up (innocent and naked)
and are so shrunk we need to know our names,
need to say them (collectively), if only to say
why we are here and in the way and what we mean

by that. (Fecktard!) At least one of us will
have to tell it with footnotes, fully referenced
(for academic veracity) in the name of a man,
born half a mile away, whose father and seven

siblings died in a plague not really worth a mention.
No wonder he loves his in text references, no wonder
I struggle to write them; shrinking as I am (a tiny
Disney house surrounded by towers) on a daily
basis (yes, daily, every blinking day).

(Samuel: 1995)


Vertiginous, he says, like when, at nightfall, I fly up and out of
myself and see that spot where she fell. The falling was neither
the beginning nor the end of her. It was simply when we knew.
There was a bleed on her brain. I don’t know when it started. She
was asleep sitting in her chair in the daytime when I popped
round the day before, something I’d never seen her do, and it
made a frail thing of her that was so much older than she would
ever be.

She’d had a good morning. It was a sunny day, and she wore a
new yellow top that had come from the catalogue. She went to
the library (the one the council has just closed) to run a new
reading group. On the way, she’d had a coffee down the market,
at an outside table. I know this because at least four people seem
to believe they’d had a coffee with her when in the aftermath
they couldn’t get their heads round it: ‘but, I saw her this
morning... coffee... the Marsh’.

Vertiginous, he says, and the symptoms, no wonder she fell. It
isn’t where she died, that spot. That was the next day, in a
hospital bed, with her daughters at her side. And when she fell,
it wasn’t dusk, more lunchtime. But it’s true. That’s when it
happens, dusk. I fly up, out of myself and see that leaf-shaped
spot.